Finding Conference Proceedings

Identifying Conference Papers on a Topic

To locate specific papers on a given topic requires the use of a database which indexes conference papers. Many databases will only cover conference papers if they happen to be published as part of a journal. Some, however, do cover papers from other sources. Databases which do so include:

ACM Digital Library^a -- computer science
African Studies -- African studies in many disciplines
AgroBase -- agriculture
L'Année Philologique -- classics
Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) -- aquatic biology, other marine sciences
Bibliography of the History of Art -- art
Biological Sciences Database -- ecology, entomology, microbiology, biochemistry, marine biology
BIOSIS Previews -- all areas of biology
Chicano Database -- Chicano studies
CIAO - Columbia International Affairs Online^a -- international affairs
Civil Engineering Database -- civil engineering and related areas
Compendex Plus -- all areas of engineering
Conference Papers Index -- science, with emphasis on aquatic, life and environmental sciences
Earthquake Engineering Abstracts -- earthquake engineering
EconLit -- economics
Energy Citations Database -- energy related topics
Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management -- environmental science and engineering
ETDEWeb -- energy related topics (conference papers published as technical reports only; some link to full text.)
Family & Society Studies Worldwide -- family studies
FRANCIS -- humanities and social science, mainly European publications
GeoRef -- geology
History of Science, Technology and Medicine -- history of science
IEEE Xplore^a -- electrical and electronic engineering and related fields.
INSPEC -- physics, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science
International Medieval Bibliography -- medieval studies
Library Literature & Information Science Full Text -- library and information science
Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts -- linguistics and language studies
Meteorological & Geoastrophysical Abstracts -- meteorology, climatology, related topics
MLA Bibliography -- languages, literature, linguistics
Oceanic Abstracts -- marine science, oceanography
PapersFirst -- all areas of scholarship
Plant Science -- botany
POPLINE -- population and population studies
PsycInfo -- psychology and related fields
SciFinder Scholar^b -- all areas of chemistry and chemical engineering, and many related fields
Sexual Diversity Studies -- gay, lesbian and transgender studies
Sociological Abstracts -- sociology and related fields
Water Resources Abstracts -- water supply and pollution
Women's Studies International -- women's studies
World Ceramics Abstracts -- ceramics and their applications

Notes: a -- full text database; b - Not a Web database; see Sciences-Engineering Reference Desk for help in accessing.

Databases vary in how to best search for conference papers. Most of the above have a "conference" field in which you can search keywords, or you can do other types of topic searches and look for a "publication type" field to limit the search to conference papers.

Locating Conference Proceedings in the UCSB Library

Once you've found a paper in the databases above, or from a reference in a bibliography or footnotes, you need to locate the item in the library. Locating the proceedings of a specific conference can be tricky.

Conference proceedings are sometimes published as individual books, or as annual series of books, or as special issues of regular journals. Sometimes a book will appear with the name of the sponsoring organization in the title, or with the organization as the author and the title of the particular meeting as the book title. Also the speed with which results get published after a conference can vary widely -- some conference proceedings never get published in hard copy at all. As a result of all these possibilities, some conference proceedings can be hard to locate.

The following are a few suggestions to help you locate conference proceedings in the UCSB Library.

Locating Conferences on PEGASUS

The best way to find conferences on the Pegasus catalog is by a Keyword search. This search on Pegasus looks for the words you supply in the authors or title words or subject headings or tables of contents (where available) regardless of which field or what order they appear in. This can get around the problem of whether the sponsoring organization appears as the author or as part of the title. In this type of search, it's a good idea to leave out words like proceedings or transactions in your first try. These are so common that they don't improve the search and may slow it down drastically.

When you display the results of a Pegasus search, the books appear in reverse chronological order -- most recent first. If you know the date of a conference, this can make locating it easy. Journals appear in the list according to the date that the journal was first published. Some major journals thus have "publication dates" in the 1800s.

Pegasus keyword searching for conferences is weakest when you only have relatively common words in the name of the conference. For example, electronics or computing by themselves make poor keyword search terms since there are so many books by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Where your keywords are common, add the term congresses, which is always part of the Library of Congress Subject Heading for a book of conference proceedings. The terms proceedings or transactions may also be useful as limiters. Alternatively, you can use the Advanced Search feature, and limit your search by Format to "Conference".

Locating Conferences on the MELVYL Catalog

Searching for conferences in the MELVYL Catalog is almost exactly the same as in the Pegasus catalog, except that the option to limit by format to "Conferences" is available in the Basic Search screen as well as in Advanced Search.

Additional Help

If none of these approaches locates the conference proceedings you are interested in, please check with the Sciences-Engineering Reference Desk or other appropriate Library Reference Desk for assistance. We may want to verify your citation and/or try checking for the conference through other catalog databases.

Author: Chuck Huber
Last modified 12/4/2003.
Direct questions or comments about this page to the author or to the Web Administrator.

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